Secret Lives of Second Wives

by Catherine Todd

  I smiled. “Mark my words” was one of my mother’s favorite expressions.

  “I’m not kidding,” Kay said.

  “I know you’re not,” I told her. “It’s just that I’m not ready to turn it into some apocalyptic struggle at this point.”

  “It already is an apocalyptic struggle,” she said seriously. “You just don’t realize it yet.”

  “Well, at least Meredith has stopped assessing my fertility,” I told her. “Or at least I think she has. For the first few months, every time we met I could see her covertly looking for swelling under my clothes. I don’t know whether to be relieved or insulted that she’s given that up.”

  She laughed. “I know what you mean. My stepdaughter was the same. It threatens them.” She lowered her voice. “But what really gets them is the fear that you’re going to get Daddy’s money. That’s what they absolutely can’t stand.”

  “We have a pre-nup, Kay,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “You’re a lawyer,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re that naive.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Okay. Maybe you’re right.”

  “You know I’m right. Tell me Meredith and Patrick haven’t become more hostile since Jack’s business took off.”

  “It’s sort of hard to tell,” I said. “It started doing really well right after we got married. Of course, times are rockier now. I don’t know if that makes them feel better or worse.”

  She drummed her perfectly lacquered nails on the place mat. “You should come to my group,” she said.

  I hadn’t known she was seeing a psychologist. “I didn’t think that was allowed,” I said.

  She frowned. “What?”

  “Outsiders. I thought … Isn’t it important to protect your privacy, so people can say what’s really on their minds?”

  She looked at me with amusement and shook her head. “It’s not that kind of group, Lynn. It’s a support group for second wives. We call ourselves the Anne Boleyn Society,” she added.

  “Anne Boleyn?” I asked, choking on my last bite of scone. “Didn’t she come to a pretty bad end?”

  “Well, ‘Second Wives Club’ was already taken,” she said seriously.

  “I can’t believe you never told me about this group,” I said. This was hardly our first conversation on this topic.

  She looked at me. “You weren’t ready,” she said.

  That sounded ominous. “Am I ready now?” I asked, temporizing. I was afraid I’d give these issues too much weight by focusing on them so intensely.

  She said slowly, as if explaining to a child, “You need to be prepared. We can help you. We’ve all been through it.” She spread her hands on the edge of the table and studied her rings. Then she leaned forward conspiratorially, one club member to another. “That incident with Janet last night, that was just the opening salvo,” she said. “You’ll see. You mark my words—”

  That expression again. This time I didn’t feel like smiling.

  “Yes?” I prompted her.

  “It’s war,” she said.

  PROMISES FROM A REAL-ESTATE AGENT, even one who’s a friend, usually fall more into the category of wishful thinking, but this time the house really was perfect. Nothing much had been done to it since the original owners built it in the fifties, and the kitchen and bathrooms were so out of date they looked retro. The closets were built for the smaller wardrobes of the postwar era. But when I looked out the living room window at the view that encompassed everything from the Golden Gate Bridge to downtown San Jose, I thought, I have to have it, like a greedy child. A moment later my superego kicked in: Jack would love this.

  “How much will they take for it?” I asked Kay.

  “You can probably get it for five million. More or less,” she said. “It needs some work.”

  “Christ,” I said, although I’d been expecting something in that ballpark. Just hearing the number out loud made it seem worse. Much worse. I looked out at the view again and thought how I would enumerate the house’s many amenities to Jack.

  “I don’t want to pressure you…,” Kay began.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Don’t give me that look,” she said. “This isn’t real-estate hustle. The market’s slowed a bit, but a house like this won’t be available long. If you can, get Jack up here this afternoon to see it. I’ve got the key, and the owners are out all day.”

  “I’m not sure we can afford it,” I said. “It’s more than we talked about spending.”

  “Talk to Jack,” she told me. “You’ll be sorry if you pass this up.”

  THE BAY AREA REAL-ESTATE SITUATION has been described in horrifying detail throughout the national media, so I probably don’t have to explain why two people of normal means (plus stock) could be contemplating the purchase of a $5 million fixer-upper. If you didn’t get into the market before the dot-com explosion drove the prices up, you could find yourself commuting from Lodi or Los Banos, Central Valley communities not generally associated with urban affluence. Even though the market had softened by 15 or 20 percent since the peak, owning a house was now outside the grasp of anyone on a middle-class salary. Thanks to the astronomical rents, there were plenty of people fully employed in the service industries who were homeless. A number of them slept on buses every night, riding to the end of the route and back. University professors lived out of their offices. Teachers and firemen and social workers packed up their bags and moved out of the area. It was the same sort of division between haves and have-nots that had led to such an unhappy outcome for Nicholas and Alexandra, not to mention more than one monarch named Louis.

  It was somewhat inconvenient to have a guilty conscience when you were living in a million-dollar tract house and had a couple more million dollars’ worth of stock options burning a hole in your pocket. I mean, Silicon Valley was not exactly Calcutta, but—all the e-hole chest beating notwithstanding—an awful lot of what put you on the “have” side of the equation was attributable to nothing more than luck. Still, there was that zillion-dollar view, and an acre of land, and space for my own home office, and …

  Thanks to Kay, I was armed with real-estate speak by the time I got home, not to mention brimming with passion. “Jack,” I cried, throwing open the door, “you have to see this house.” I almost lost it and shouted, It’s a steal, but I was stopped in my tracks by Patrick, who was sitting with his father at the kitchen table. In my enthusiasm I’d forgotten he might still be there.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Jack gave me a sheepish smile. “Join us?” he asked.

  “Hi,” Patrick said, not looking at me.

  Jack put his hand on Patrick’s arm. “It will all work out, son. You’ll see.”

  Whatever it was, Patrick looked unconvinced. “You’ll talk to her?” he said to his father.

  Jack nodded.

  Patrick got to his feet. “I’ve got to get going,” he said. “Thanks for putting me up for the night, Dad.” He turned in my direction but still didn’t meet my eyes. “Bye,” he said.

  “Bye.”

  Jack was silent for a moment after he left. I had an uneasy feeling that I was about to hear something I wouldn’t like. I wasn’t wrong.

  “What’s up?” I asked, as cheerfully as I could manage. Blended families were like Secrets and Lies; everybody was hiding something.

  “Sit down,” Jack said.

  Uh-oh. I sat.

  “Patrick lost his job,” he said.

  Again. I mean, people had been laid off all over the Bay Area, some of them more than once, but I suspected that Patrick’s dismal employment history had little to do with the economy and a lot to do with his talent for self-sabotage. “I’m really sorry,” I said.

  “There was some kind of misunderstanding with his boss,” Jack said glumly. Patrick worked for an advertising agency. He was part of a copy-writing team preparing print, radio, and TV ads for the youth market. I’d seen one of the ads for a portable video game—not something I’
d ordinarily notice until Jack pointed it out. The creative director had wanted a soundtrack that was unique, and the team found a hip-hop song on an obscure dance label, traced the producer, and, after removing the vocals, re-orchestrated the rhythm track itself to the finished commercial, Jack explained. He wasn’t perfectly clear what Patrick’s role had been, but teamwork is teamwork, after all. “He’s better on visuals than with words,” Jack observed. No kidding.

  Before that, Patrick had had a misunderstanding with his boss at a brokerage house, and before that, he’d decided that high-school teaching, for which he’d spent a postgraduate year of preparation, was not for him. Jack had been subsidizing his rent for half a decade.

  “That’s too bad,” I said neutrally. Biting your tongue comes naturally—though not effortlessly—when you have adult stepchildren.

  “Yes.” He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. He looked tired. And disappointed. Again. I reminded myself that his solicitude for his children was a quality I admired.

  “The thing is…,” he said.

  I could tell that the part I was really going to dislike was coming next. I refused to help him say whatever it was. I just sat there.

  “I’m really sorry, Lynn,” he said. “The thing is … Patrick wants to move back into the house.”

  4

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  I’d met my husband, Jackson Hughes, at one of those continuing-education courses the California bar puts on to fend off regulation by the state government. There is a core suite of mandatory requirements, most of them having to do with the blunter side of practice ethics: how to dodge sexual-harassment lawsuits, how to avoid substance abuse, how not to get your ass in a crack by mishandling your client’s money. For the rest of your required hours, you can pick and choose among varied offerings, so long as you do the time.

  As you might imagine, a very lucrative business has arisen out of the need to provide these courses. For a while you could take Tibetan Bell Ringing or Interpersonal Office Dynamics Part II for credit, a grown-up version of what happened to university curricula in the seventies when the canon was thrown out. A former governor’s bitter warfare with the state bar at length forced a retrenchment, so now some of the better programs come coupled with a resort package: learn how to behave yourself in the morning, play tennis in the afternoon.

  I don’t play tennis, but I was sitting in the ballroom of the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego listening to a videotaped lecture entitled “Innovative Prenuptial Agreements,” surrounded by people who obviously did. Some had even brought their rackets to the lecture. It didn’t matter; the video had no feelings to be hurt by lack of attention. Despite the proximity to the beach, it was hot and stuffy in the room. The speaker was reading from the program handbook, which was open right in front of me: “‘Although John has made no promises and shall be under no obligation to do so, he may, in his sole discretion, transfer to Mary from time to time, as her sole and separate property,’ ” etc., etc. Riveting stuff, that. And why do people have to read things to you that you can presumably read for yourself?

  I caught myself listing forward, eyes closed, for the third time. I checked my watch. There was a half hour left in the session. I resigned myself to the fact that I had reached the end of my capacity for concentration, which, under the circumstances, wasn’t all that large. I opened my attaché case and lifted the lid, balancing the case on my knees. Then I opened Prodigal Summer and started reading, the way I used to under the covers, after “lights-out.”

  I needn’t have bothered with the subterfuge. No one else was listening either, with the exception of one or two people taking copious marginal notes in the program handbook. Either they were in the family-law and estate-planning field or they had a personal interest in a pre-nup, or maybe both. The rest of us were just marking time.

  I was so lost in the book by the time the session ended, I didn’t hear Jack’s comment the first time out.

  “Pardon me?” I said, looking up.

  “That’s a good book,” he repeated, standing next to my chair.

  “Have you read it?” I asked, surprised. I’d recently been to a Barbara Kingsolver book signing attended by 750 people. Approximately 725 of them were women.

  He looked down, a little guiltily, and pushed his hair back from his face. “Actually, no. Not yet. My sister recommended it.”

  “Ah,” I said neutrally. I recognized an opening gambit when I heard one, although lately they’d been a little thin on the ground. I didn’t mind. It was a very public place, and I liked talking about books. Plus, the hair thing was definitely attractive. Besides, I didn’t have anything much better to do than go home and share a can of tuna with Brewer, my cat. (Separate forks, naturally.)

  “I liked The Poisonwood Bible, though,” he said.

  Much better. Points scored for that, for sure.

  “What’s this one about?” he asked.

  I smiled. “Generally or specifically?”

  “Generally, I guess.” He sat down in the chair next to me. “Do you mind?”

  He didn’t sprawl all over the chair arm or lean forward into my face, so I made a gesture: Be my guest. “I haven’t finished, but so far I’d say it’s about the interconnectedness of different life forms,” I told him.

  He made an involuntary face.

  I laughed. “Sorry. I know that sounds sort of pretentious. You’ll have to read it yourself and see what you think. I think it’s great.”

  “I will. Thanks.” He paused. “I’m Jack Hughes,” he said.

  “Lynn Bartlett.”

  “Are you practicing?”

  I nodded. “Immigration. I’m a sole practitioner here in San Diego.”

  He swallowed. “Really? Well, I suppose San Diego must be a good place for that. Um, do you like it?”

  I was used to this kind of response. Immigration is not the usual field of choice for top law-school graduates, most of whom choose to work themselves into neurasthenic fugue states at corporate law firms. “Immigration” conjures up visions of barefoot hordes carrying their worldly possessions in a cloth tied to the end of a stick, characters out of El Norte. I’d helped a few people like that, but in reality many of my clients were better educated than most of the lawyers I knew.

  “I do, as a matter of fact,” I said. “What about you?”

  “Corporate. High tech, actually. Silicon Valley?” He said it almost sheepishly. This was the period when Silicon Valley was starting to make the news, gleeful reportage calculated to excite envy and lust, the era made famous by Po Bronson before he went off to interview failed techies starting a new life as sheep ranchers in Idaho.

  “I’ve heard of it,” I told him.

  He looked as if he couldn’t decide whether I was serious or not.

  “I’m kidding,” I said. “I went to Stanford, eons ago.”

  “Really?” he said again. “How did you end up here?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You mean where everybody surfs and smells like coconut suntan lotion?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He probably did, though. That more or less summed up the view Northern Californians had of Southern California. That, and “They’re stealing our water.” It made for an interesting state government.

  “It’s a long story,” I told him. “The brief summary is that my husband and I were living in New York, we got divorced, I couldn’t afford to stay there, and my parents were living in Southern California, so I eventually settled here. I like it. There isn’t a whole lot of culture, but it’s much more livable than L.A.” I smiled. “Plus, I like the smell of coconut.”

  “So do I,” he said.

  “Well,” I said. The ballroom had more or less emptied out, and the vacuum cleaners would be brought in any second. I began to gather up my papers.

  “Look, Lynn,” he said, “if you’re not doing anything tonight, would you like to have dinner? I don’t know anyone in San Diego, and I was ju
st going to get room service here. It would be much nicer to eat in the dining room and have someone to talk to.”

  I liked that he kept it low-key. I liked that he didn’t touch me. I especially liked that he didn’t try to flatter me or act too attentive, a modus operandi that always put me on my guard. This is making me sound as if I’m devastatingly attractive or catnip to men or something like that, and I’m not. I’m not bad-looking, but I was already over forty, and being treated like Jennifer Lopez smacked to me of insincerity, if not idiotic desperation.

  It was just dinner and conversation. Still, I couldn’t help checking for a tan line on his ring finger.

  He caught me looking and smiled. “I’m divorced,” he said.

  As long as we were being candid, I thought I might as well go for broke. “How long ago?” I asked.

  He laughed. “A long time ago. Years. You’re very cautious, aren’t you?”

  I shook my head. “Just experienced,” I told him.

  A LONG TIME LATER, Jack told me, “You have no idea what you looked like, sitting in that big room with your nose in a book. You seemed so calm, so centered. You looked like the kind of person who would never ‘settle.’ I really liked that about you. I still like it,” he added, and kissed me.

  By then we had told each other our life stories, met each other’s friends, and spent several weekends together, mostly in bed, in Los Altos or La Jolla. We’d gone hiking in the mountains, disagreed passionately over the merits of All the Pretty Horses, and developed a mutual affection for Bandar the binturong at the zoo. I had even met Meredith and Patrick, who seemed, in addition to safely grown and out of the house, politely uninterested in our relationship.

  But I still thought he gave me too much credit. I wasn’t calm; I was resigned. I would rather be alone than with the wrong man, so I was alone. I didn’t really mind; I had friends, I had a reasonably successful practice, I had a condo in La Jolla, and Brewer the cat to come home to. I might have been picky and dismissive, but I’d found that too many men who say that what they really want is a relationship with an independent woman are not necessarily emotionally equipped to handle it.